The Trust of God (the Harry Potter piece I didn’t expect to write)

“He must have known I'd want to leave you."
"No, he must have known you would always want to come back.”

—Ron and Harry

The frame of the twin bed was mahogany, stout; the blankets, light blue and thinning with age, at least in my memories’ recounting. Tumbling back into them, I am eight again, maybe nine, and my Aunt Kathryn is draped in an oversized man’s tank top, folded onto the corner of the mattress reading us another adventure of The Boxcar Children. It’s hard to believe she was younger then than I am now. It’s hard to believe she’d never make it past her forties.

It felt odd and different and wonderful to be jettied into the thick of my cousins’ nighttime chapter book routine whose narrative beginnings and ends I’d never hear on the other sides of my sporadic sleepover visits. But their rhythm was a ritual I was invited to witness. It was, by all accounts, a transcending of episodic picture books and the nestling into a familial agreement to journey—a little every night—further into a tale, trusting (despite our youth) that we could hold an unresolved story through another day. It marked me.

Our sleepovers must have lessened when they’d taken to reading Harry Potter together, as those scenes weren’t filed in my archives as vividly as Nancy Drew and The Chronicles of Narnia. But I knew why it mattered when my cousins began to talk of taking their own families to Diagon Alley in Universal at first chance. I knew that the dragon-crowned Gringotts was now the pilgrimage of years- and lives-passed—of books read and movies watched with their mother in the time before we knew we had so little.

I know this is why, when my own son turned eight, I so wanted to start the literary journey toward Hogwarts with him as well. And so every night, and some days, for months now, we’ve read chapter after chapter of the world-making series that changed the landscape of nearly every medium known to our society for decades. It has bound us in ways I didn’t expect with invisible, relational cords, magic.

It has also made me think often of God’s trust.

Maybe because my prefrontal cortex had not yet fully formed upon first reading the books in my youth, or because essays and crushes competed for my attention, but it has been as if I am experiencing the story for the first time with my son—holding my breath through duels and crying thick crocodile tears into my Kindle over sentences of hard-won hope. Whatever the reason, while we swipe pages, I am wrapped and considering.

And the thing that has most held my thoughts through the winding wizarding tale has been the complexities of the concept of trust within the quest of long-haul love for the greater good. The protagonists (Harry, Ron, Hermione)—children-turned-teenagers—who are commissioned to do the impossible in the war to defeat an evil created by one man’s ruinous fear of death are left, especially in the last volume, with very few direct instructions from their now deceased commissioner (Dumbledore). And throughout chapters and chapters of agonizing frustration, doubt, and insecurity, the theme persists: “He did not trust us enough with what mattered to see this through.”

The reader, however, having the privilege of perspective, is granted an occasional hunch that Dumbledore could not have possibly dumped all of the directives at once before his passing, as they would have been devastatingly overwhelming or dangerous. And so in the end, when all the pieces are discovered in the ways that were anticipated by the people who were capable in the places and at the time that mattered, love and friendship win the day and our suspicions are confirmed: what felt like no trust and total abandonment in the moment, turned out to be total trust that the people had everything they needed to get there, in time.

It was not, it turns out, that the young wizards were not being trusted with the pieces needed to save each other from hell-on-earth. It was that they were being trusted beyond their wildest comprehension and confidence to become who they needed to become to do what they needed to do when it was possible to do it.

Of course, as the actual world rages in actual war, it is hard not (albeit, bordering on cheap) to make the comparison: Are we pawns in a twisted game of finitude and frailty? Are we hopeless, and for good reason? Have we been abandoned by God and not trusted with what is needed for love to win? Is our commission the making of mortal myth, a futile fantasy of too-positive people?

And yet, at night—after fielding news and pictures all day of death and destruction, when I fold onto the corner of my kid’s bed in an oversized tank top like the woman whose story felt bigger than her cancer—I sniff choppily through words like, “The last words Albus Dumbledore spoke to the pair of us? Harry is the best hope we have. Trust him.” And I feel my child, like my inner-child wrapped in thinning blue blankets, watching cautiously and with intrigue as tiny windows into human truth fall down my cheeks. I hope somewhere at his core he is tucking down seeds of consideration: maybe we have been trusted with far more than we can know right now, with far more than we would ever trust to ourselves.

***

What if . . .

God trusts you?

What if your default was recognized as life more than death?

What if you’re not wired for screwing up; you’re just a feeling person in a fragile world ever learning how to be infinite and finite at the same time?

What if you weren’t a mess to redeem as much as you were a mystery to be reminded that you look like love to God?

What if you didn’t need holy pardoning like you need holy illuminating?

What if that is the salvation of it all?

What if . . .

God trusts you?

Enough to put the whole of hope for the entire world—all these years and all these people—in the most tender baby skin, in a human family tree, in a needy state, in tumultuous times?

What if Emmanuel, God with us, is a story of worth?

Of vulnerability?

Of interdependence with the divine?

Of God believing in us?

Of every-two-hour feedings instead of an army?

Of “hold me mama” instead of panicked proselytizing?

Of strength that looks like weakness and acts like birth?

What if God trusts you?

What if you could trust you?

What if trust begets trust?

What if I trusted you like God trusts you?

Enough to need you? Enough to let myself need you.

Not in spite of your humanity, but precisely, extraordinarily, world-changingly, counter-culturally because of it?

[“What If God Trusts You,” Britney Winn Lee, patreon.com/ruahwritings]

Recently, my son looked out the window at the passing pines, sketchers dangling, as we left the place where I had just shared a sermon about how far love will go. Quietly, confidently he said to no particular person, “It sounded like Harry Potter.”

That’s because—I later muse and he’ll later learn—all the best stories are all the same story, in the end.